תמר פלג שריק, מאת: עמאד סבע

תמר פלג שריק שמתה אתמול בגיל 97, הייתה עורכת דין ופעילה ישראלית למען זכויות פלסטינים. היא ייצגה אלפי עצירים ומחבלים פלסטינים וסייעה לשחרור רבים מהם ממעצר.

הנה מה שכתב עליה ידידי, עמאד סבע, הפלסטיני שהיה אחד מהעצירים המנהליים שבהם טיפלה בשנות ה – 90:

For the many Palestinians she tirelessly defended in military courts, she was simply known as Tamar.   Often dressed in black, with her short-cropped white hair, glasses, and ever-ready smile which would often turn to a chuckle, Tamar Pelleg-Sryck was a fierce human rights defender, a principled opponent of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and a wonderful human being who loved books and had a youthfulness all her own, even in old age. 

Tamar was also my lawyer.  She quickly became a friend whose friendship I cherished and carried with me as a gift.  I deeply mourn her passing, as I am sure, so do hundreds of Palestinians who have experienced the injustices and indignities of incarceration, interrogation, torture, and administrative detention and had Tamar to defend them, in the best way she could, against a court system which was an integral part of the occupation machinery.  

I first met Tamar in the Magiddo Military Prison where I was sent after receiving an administrative detention order in December 1995.  Those were the early days of the post-Oslo agreements, when the newly installed Palestinian Authority was starting to take over control of the larger Palestinian cities after the initial Gaza-Jericho launchpad.  As part of setting the ground for the new realities of post-Oslo, Israel started placing those opposed to Oslo in detention without charge, branding them “enemies of peace”.   As the numbers of administrative detainees surged, Tamar started taking on some of their cases, including mine.

I cannot exactly recall the details of that first meeting.  In my hazy memory, it was a brief encounter on a cold, grey day, with the usual exchanges that take place at such meetings: news about the family, initial thoughts about appealing the detention order, and questions about prison conditions.   The coldness of that December day seems to have also suffused our meeting which in my mind was also cold and unremarkable.   Tamar had initially hesitated over taking my case, and – not knowing her – I also was not sure whether I wanted her as my lawyer.    

The more Tamar visited, the more we talked and got to know each other.  A warmth developed, entwined in respect and genuine human connection.   The visits started to get longer as time passed.  Tamar started bringing me books from her personal library.  Both the long conversations and the books took me out of the grimness of prison, with its brutal routines of degrading headcounts, the spread of tents which housed us hemmed in by barbed wire everywhere.   It was there, in Magiddo, that Nadine Gordimer, Hanna Levy-Hass (the mother of journalist Amira Hass), Paul Auster, Jacobo Timmerman, William Styron, William Trevor and many others kept me company, all carried to me by Tamar.   The experience of reading Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner in Magiddo, chasing the light of guard towers to devour a few more pages was of such deep joy and beauty that now erases all other memories of that prison.  What remains for me is that indescribable, mysterious elation a book bestowed on me in that magic moment, forever associated for me with Tamar.

When some of the books and magazines Tamar brought me disappeared before I received them, Tamar was furious and had a showdown with the Magiddo authorities, extracting from them a commitment to ensure that every single book and scrap of paper reached me.  Young soldiers, acting as unlikely censors, were tasked with checking the books when Tamar was with me in the visit room, and to decree which were eligible and unharmful.  They often judged books by their covers, which was funny to see, but Tamar’s agreement with their superiors meant that they no longer could treat any of those books disrespectfully, even the ones they deemed dangerous material.

Tamar was a teacher and organizer, long before she became an attorney at the age of sixty-one.  That remarkable decision to enter the field of law at that age is key to understanding Tamar’s personality, her boundless energy, her deep rebellion against injustice, her fighting spirit.  In her determination to defend Palestinian prisoners in a hopelessly biased nominal military justice system with its inevitable pre-dermined outcomes, she was a Palestinian to her core, demonstrating that indefatigable psyche and spirit as summed up by Emile Habibi’s wonderful and sad pessopsimist:  never giving up, accepting what is and what befalls you, saying “it could be worse” and continuing to fight, hoping against hope as it were, something we as administrative detainees had to learn to do as well.   She rejoiced in the small victories she and we were allowed, such as that concession from the Magiddo authorities regarding the entry of books, but always saw those in perspective.  

Tamar was instrumental in my release, against all odds, after twenty months of successive military orders of varying lengths of detention.  She encouraged me to write and made it her own fight to ensure that my words reached more people.   Unsuccessful appeals to the military courts and once to the Supreme Court did not deter her.  Her happiness when she showed me the draft of an article that Serge Schmemann, the Jerusalem Burau Chief of the New York Times had written about me (“It will appear on the front page of the Times,” she told me proudly) was not flustered one iota when some mysterious editor in the same paper decided to kill the article which was never published.   When the Supreme Court finally ruled in August 1997 for my release to four years of exile and I was in Ramleh Prison waiting to leave to the Netherlands, it was Tamar who brought me a suitcase with the smell of home of freedom, a Palestinian passport, news from my family, and information about when I might be allowed to leave.  

In freedom, Tamar and I, met a number of times, together with my wife and children: in Rotterdam (where her daughter lived) and the Hague (where I lived), in Paris, and in London.  We spoke regularly, on the phone, and corresponded through emails.   She was always her energetic and curious self, with the headband that donned her white hair, working all the time, living all the time. We eventually lost contact, but that did not diminish the depth of my feelings of love and respect for the wonderful human being that Tamar was.

In one of our prison conversations, Tamar was describing a woman she knew.  “She wrinkles beautifully”, she said.   She explained that as people grow older and their wrinkles start to increase, that physical transformation happens beautifully to some, and horribly to others.   She never said that was possibly an expression of their souls.  But perhaps she implied it.  Tamar, as she grew older, kept wrinkling beautifully, her beautiful soul always reflecting itself on the surface of her face.  

For me as a Palestinian, as the genocide in Gaza continues and hate runs deep, to mourn Tamar at such a moment is a reminder of the faith Palestinians and Israelis who are deeply opposed to the occupation must maintain: that one day, no matter how far away that day is in the future, the occupation will be over. 

Remembering Tamar now, for everything she did, is also an occasion to recognize and reflect on the other Tamars out there in Israel: the fighters against occupation and its injustices, those who are human to their core.  

והנה הלינק לסרט דוקומנטרי קצר – כלוב זהב – שיצרתי ב – 1999 על עמאד סבע עבור ערוץ 2. כך הכרתי אותו ומאז אנחנו שומרים על חברות נפלאה. כבר 25 שנים.